Documenting Displacement Through Art

Archives primarily contain records about refugees rather than by refugees, while news media and political discourse often frame displacement through dehumanizing metaphors and crisis spectacle. This article examines how participatory digital archives can intervene in these representational regimes. Focusing on The Amplification Project—a community-led archive of displacement-related art—I theorize collective interventionist archiving as collaborative work that leverages digital archives to disrupt dominant frames and shift the terms through which refugee lives are represented. Through analysis of the archive’s founding, both relationship-based and crowdsourced collection development, and circulation practices, I demonstrate how such archives create infrastructure for encountering refugeedom on terms other than crisis news or platformed outrage, while confronting constraints, including partial visibility, hostile publics, and unequal digital access.